On Drug Legalization

I wrote about Will Wilkinson's pot smoking a few weeks back. I don't write on this topic often, but I've learned that drug decriminalization is not only backed by (putative) libertarians, but is a top issue favored by secular progressives and hardline big-government collectivists.

A woman in East Liverpool, Ohio, smokes crystal methamphetamine in her dealer's kitchen.

In the comments to my post, where I mentioned my concerns over how factors outside the home may well adversely affect the health and safety of my boys, Tao from "A Radical Perspective" attacked me thus:

If you worry about your kids hanging out with the wrong people, or the drug culture, then quit blogging so much and spend sometime [sic] raising them.

I don't put much credibility in whatever merit folks can raise in favor of drug decriminalization, but when folks attack me on the assumption that I'm not raising my kids well, it just shows how personal it is for the nihilists.

Well it turns out there's more on the decriminalization debate online today. Time's got a piece, for example, "The Portuguese Experiment: Did Drug Decriminalization Work?" (via Memeorandum), and the Wall Street Journal covers the Portuguese case as well, in "Drugs: To Legalize or Not."

For conservative bloggers, there's a particular interest in Portugal's decriminalization program in that Glenn Greenwald (the same Glenn Greenwald of Rick Ellensburg fame) is the author of study that's cited by Time and has been touted by the Cato Institution. The Master Sock Puppet himelf is blogging about it, naturally.

I'm not going to convince the left-libertarians that decriminalization is a bad idea. These people claim, from the evidence in Portugal, that "decriminalization does not result in increased drug use."

The huge methodological problem here is that Greenwald and the others are generalizing from a single case, but that's not really my beef. From personal experience, and from what knowledgeable friends in academe and law enforcement tell me, drug decriminalization - always expected to start with marijuan, the "non-dangerous" drug) - would be a disaster for both personal lives, families, and society.

That said, let me direct readers to John Walters' piece, also at the Journal. Walters is executive vice president of Hudson Institute and was director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the G.W. Bush administration. Please read the entire essay, but this part relates to Master Tao's attack:

When I became the drug policy director in 2001, we faced an inherent weakness in prevention programs for youth. Teens told us they had been taught the dangers of drugs, but if their boyfriend or girlfriend used they did not want to be judgmental or estranged, so they were likely to join in.

Walters stresses the dangers of addiction, and the responsiblity of society to protect the vulnerable. But the conclusion responds directly and powerfully to the Greenwalds and Wilkinsons of the world, and their left-libertarian allies:

We can make progress faster when more of us learn that drug use and addiction can not be an expression of individual liberty in a free society. Drug abuse is, by nature and the laws of organic chemistry that govern this disease, incompatible with freedom and civil society. Drug abuse makes human life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (a special version of Hobbes's hell in our own families). In the deepest sense, this is why failure is not an option.

Photo Credit: Wall Street Journal.